She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Black Reason, White Feeling: The Jeffersonian Enlightenment in the African American Tradition, and reported the following:
Page 99 of my book has in its first line the title of a new subsection called "Rational Liberty." This section is part of chapter 5, "The Lessons of Reason," which makes the case that the hermeneutics of the Declaration of Independence were decisively transformed by the strong concepts of reason, knowledge, and principle that were emphasized by African American intellectuals from the 1770s to the 1850s and beyond. As shown in this chapter, these concepts gradually overwrote the original emphasis on feeling, opinion, and assent that had characterized Jefferson's version of the Declaration, thus gradually endowing the document with the universalist meanings that have become familiar today. On page 99, I discuss the term rational liberty in the work of a successful Philadelphia businessman and Patriot veteran from the revolutionary war, James Forten, who used it in his Series of Letters by a Man of Color (1813) to illustrate the universalism of his interpretation of both the Declaration and the Pennsylvania Constitution. In his view, the ideals of universal liberty and equality expressed in these documents embraced "the Indian and the European, the Savage and the Saint, the Peruvian and the Laplander, the white Man and the African."Learn more about Black Reason, White Feeling at the University of Virginia Press website.
In discussing the transformative power of African American concepts of reason and rational liberty, page 99 is indeed representative of the book's larger argument, which may be boiled down to the claim, essentially, that reason is better than its reputation in the humanities. For a long time, the default approach to reason in disciplines such as literary or cultural studies has consisted in the tendency to conflate it with concepts such as "instrumental rationality" and discuss the Enlightenment mainly as the cynical project of elite white men who appealed to reason not to liberate, but to rule and oppress the rest of the world. In its aim to develop a more nuanced approach, my book overlaps with, but also departs from, the work of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who has recently used the term rational liberty in the title of the second volume of his extensive history of faith and knowledge (Vernünftige Freiheit: Spuren des Diskurses über Glauben und Wissen / Rational Liberty: Traces of the Discourse of Faith and Knowledge, 2019). Habermas's discussion of rational liberty does not include either Jefferson, Forten, or the African American tradition. By contrast, I argue that the modern relationship between faith and knowledge needs to be explained in its specific historical constellation in the American context. And in the formative decades of the United States, it was not Kant or Hegel, but writers such as Wheatley, Jefferson, or Forten who defined this relationship. Jefferson sought to silence Wheatley's stance by describing it as the pre-Enlightened product of "religion" – a prejudice that has continued to inform clichés about the African American tradition. Ironically, Jefferson's Declaration still referenced "nature's God" directly, whereas thinkers such as Lemuel Haynes or James Forten went a step further: while their Enlightenment arguments were likewise embedded in a Christian worldview, they already referred to the political, man-made document of the Declaration of Independence as the normative foundation of their claims, thus continuing Wheatley's emphasis on the rational "principle" of universal liberty and transferring the ideal of universal human rights into the secular present of American modernity.
--Marshal Zeringue
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